Living a Curious Life

A guest post from Jenn Zuko

Exploring Life and Literature

Dear friends,

During the months of December and January, Beyond the Bookshelf is exploring the idea of Lifelong Learning. This topic is near and dear to my heart and is intimately tied to my love of literature. However, I wanted to hear from others what their perspectives were on the topic. Back in September, I put out a call for guest submissions on the topic. The response was overwhelming and I am excited to host the second of those guest essays today.

Jenn Zuko

grew up in Boulder, Colorado. She currently makes her home with her partner and two amazing teenage stepgoblins, who are his kids in Denver, just a short drive away. In her own words, she works “as an overworked, underpaid, not-so-absentminded professor. Adjunct faculty, of course.” She teaches writing, literature, art appreciation, body language, and theatre. In her spare time, she is also a fight choreographer for local theatres. One of her favorite hobbies aligns with her love of theatre. She produces and often performs in a variety show based on old vaudeville and burlesque revues. There she sings, does comedy, and performs burlesque. Throughout her life, reading has long been a comfort and joy. She believes that an important part of her career is putting the right books in front of the right people at the right time. A favorite that she recommends is Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip due in large part to its suspenseful, character-driven story.

Please enjoy this journey beyond the bookshelf as Jenn shares her thoughts on the importance of lifelong learning.

This image is from a delightful essay collection by T.S. Blakeney called Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? It’s one of those volumes of essays with a bunch of footnotes that I enjoy so much.

‘Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.’ ~Sherlock Holmes, from ‘The Red Circle,’ in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes says this, responding to Watson’s query as to why he’s continuing the strange investigation into The Red Circle (which they don’t know it’s about yet). Watson asks why he’s still searching for the solution to the mystery if he gains nothing from it. Holmes talks a bit about art for art’s sake and then questions him back as to why he continues to study, to read medical journals, etc. Watson reveals it’s for ‘education’, and that’s when Holmes delivers this beautiful line.

My own love of Sherlockian stuff connects to a love of acquiring knowledge that I’ve held for most of my life (at least since I read the books). Sherlock Holmes is an icon of the lifelong learning concept: he’s constantly researching, reading, and praising schools as centers full of ‘bright seeds of the future.’ He’s constantly teaching the official police and Watson about how his methods of analytic detection work, which, as anyone who’s taught anyone knows, is a sure way to learn more about a topic.

Holmes reads up on all the past crimes he can so that he can better solve current ones. ‘There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can't unravel the thousand and first.’ (Study in Scarlet)

So. Lifelong learning. Do I have a thesis encapsulating this concept? Well, my norm on my own publication is all about Musings, which tends to be a practice more about mulling over a bunch of ideas and loosely knitting them together, than arguing a clear point from a distilled hypothesis. If I were to try and focus on one, though, I think it’d be that lifelong learning is one of the most important practices for a human being in order to engage in a well-lived life in a vibrant society.

A Humble Profession

‘Education isn’t a state or pinnacle that we reach. It is, Cronon writes, “a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusion that our educations will ever be complete.” ‘ (Josh Dolezal, ‘How I Became a Scholar’)

I was so psyched to see Dolezal’s essay on education and learning just as I was mulling over and outlining this piece of my own. There’s so much food for thought here, especially about what happens to a young man’s brain when he’s exposed to higher education; the opening wide of the mind and the worldview. Especially compelling to me is his description of how learning hermeneutics not only taught him about the art and science of interpretation, but about personal humility.

Learning makes the self no longer the center of the universe–like when a toddler grows up into an older child and then young adult and realizes that there are other people in the world, those who have full and different lives and active brains and human thoughts about life, and experiences the self doesn’t have. Learning does a similar thing to a young adult’s worldview–there’s more than one way to live, and there’s a technique to close reading, integrating reading into one’s knowledge that isn’t being spoon-fed and interpreted for them by somebody like a lecturer or a pastor. To continue learning throughout one’s life is to continue to grow in to a richer, smarter, more loving person with each passing year (and each contemplated lesson).

Good literature (as I always tell my Children’s Lit students in particular) works like either a mirror or a window: a reader sees a reflection of herself, or sees through a window into a different person. If a student only has ‘mirror’ literature, they never learn about what it’s like to be someone else, and therefore either can’t believe they exist or believe that they themselves must be superior. Book banners are trying to do this; to make all books that students access into mirrors, not windows. Seeing how life is for a different person (or people) takes away the safe surety of an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. It gives a reader humility, and from there, empathy.

And this can feel like a betrayal, for those whose worldview is tiny.

This is why (I think) some communities are so disdainful, if not fearful, of higher education–they call it indoctrination but it’s not: it’s hermeneutics into humility. It’s coming to a book or a fact from a different angle than that given to the student by the pre-education family, or church. That’s what learning is: making a meal on one’s own, instead of gaping wide and swallowing mama bird’s vomit as one’s only food.

~

Oh how I used to love reading in school in all kinds of genres, both assigned and not. I started reading very early, and therefore was already engaged with novels by the time I entered kindergarten (Charlotte’s Web was my favorite as a 5 year old). I’d always have at least one novel in my armload of schoolwork at any given time: Lord of the Rings and Nancy Drew mysteries in elementary school, Agatha Christie’s master detectives and Dylan Thomas’ poetry in junior high, and all kinds of things amid my intensive theatre absorption, including Sherlock Holmes and Gertrude Stein, in high school. I absorbed books like rich meals–I was the only one in elementary school that actually looked forward to and relished the all-day-reading days, and the SSR half days that we were prescribed frequently (it being the ‘80s when teaching to the test wasn’t quite so draconic). Silent Sustained Reading continues to be a great pleasure to me to this day, and I wish all schools and jobs would incorporate this practice for their attendants.

A Posh Profession

And so of course when it came to more schooling, and even beginning a career in what I can only say is reading and writing and discussing same, I got into academia as a profession. I go much more into the struggles I slowly discovered about the politics and oppressions of higher ed in my memoir, so look at especially the opening pieces in that serial for more details. You’d think that being a ‘professor’ would be a high level, high class profession, but I found out the hard way that it’s absolutely not. But the aspects of my job that I find enjoyable regardless are those that relate to this topic: a life long with learning, through reading. Plus, I have a captive audience to nerd out with me about said readings. They, like, have to listen to me geek out about books; it’s pretty great.

A Pleasing Practice

There’s a joy in plunging into a warm pool of research and writing, preferably with stacks of resources next to me–that’s one of the loveliest feelings when learning, to me. Though my ease of copious and quick reading has diminished somewhat because of a combination of brain fogs stemming from COVID lockdown trauma and perimenopause, reading is still something I do daily to soothe my brain to sleep, or in lieu of calming meditation. Even readings that I am required to do for my job can be mightily satisfying, and can feed me as well as good food.

Nice Work if You Can Get it

The more and more difficulties that are inherent in making a living, even a partial one, in writing, even journalism or copywriting, says something about the view of learning’s importance today. Or academia, even at the higher ed level, is overrun with poverty-paid adjuncts (hi, it’s me) instead of of high ranking and high paid professors. Learning isn’t valued: if you haven’t already learned it, don’t waste our time. Learning isn’t a process, society says; it’s a piece of credentialed paper you purchase with a lot of money and good grades. Teachers are there to provide you with the grades that you’ve bought. There’s no longer the idea that the student earns the grade they get. Knowledge is a commodity.

~

Shelfie Showoff

We have a lot of fun on Substack each weekend as we share a shelfie or a stack of books. The aesthetic appeal of this plus the brain-food of it all is such a comfort, and it’s heartening to see how much some of us love books. Of course, it can be argued that most people who use Substack are lifelong learners, being writers mainly which means everyone’s a voracious reader. But there’s something to be said for how much a vision of somebody else’s pile of reading makes me feel like my brain is de-fragging.* It’s a centering practice, just looking at those spines, much like a breathing exercise, a meditation, or a power nap. This weekend practice gives me hope, and makes me think that maybe the above problems aren’t literally everybody’s attitude. It’s hard to keep this in mind, though, every time another book gets banned or a school closes or I get my tiny paycheck on the 1st of the month after so much brain work. And so I shuffle about in cozy socks to choose which bookshelf I’ll share with my Shelfie/Stack friends next. And I calm down a little.

*Remember back in the early days of high-graphics PC gaming, when we had to periodically de-frag our hard drives in order to speed up the computer’s processor and de-glom its memory? Good times…

Zuko / Bradley intermediate tbr shelf. As of today (of this writing). It fluctuates quite a bit.

Pictured above is what I call the ‘intermediate tbr’ shelf of the home. It’s not the immediate tbr that’s right next to our workstations, but it’s not way put away on the big collective shelves either. The books here are those that are intermediately tbr for both my partner and me. Oh, and! That little purple soft leather spine you can barely see? That’s my ‘book-book’: after reading a book, I write down the title, author, and genre of the finished reading in this little book, along with the medium and a special note if I skimmed it or read it in one sitting.

Kinky Books

I was going to go into the fascinating world of the fetishization of books as objects and worship of them as collections, but you know what? I realize this is a whole ‘nother full length essay, and it’s honestly a fascinating topic, especially when you dip toes into the cottage core trend and the horrific images of the bookshelves where all the books are placed backwards… anyway I need to write a lot more about this particular fetish, so let’s just leave you here with a tease on that and move on to zombies. Cool? Cool.

~

The Walking Dead

A lack of respect for experts (and not seeing nor believing the hard work and diligent craft that goes into building said expertise) makes for a plague of the incurious, those to whom all knowledge is only that which they can perceive with their own eyes. Knowledge is hard work, it’s not just something that you’re born with, or that grows organically within a ‘smart person’s brain. It’s diligence, trial and error, some failure, and difficult. Is learning worth it? Heck yes, says anyone who’s done it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not

(Also, The Walking Dead is a comic book series. And zombies are a metaphor. But I’m sure you knew that.)

The Magic Genius Myth

So I do go into this concept a little in my Sherlock reviews, particularly the reviews of Season 4. I go into how the Smart Person Magic (™) is false, and damages not only the smart people recovering from Talented and Gifted programs, but those who ‘only’ work hard, and so are told they’re stupid. Neither thing is true: intelligence is learning, talent is work. They’re not separate phenomena.

Here’s a clip of some of this ranting, er, discussion of mine on Smart Person Magic (™) from my review of Sherlock ep 11:

Another thing I do not buy: Sherlock is deeply haunted by Moriarty and also has a sudden interest in intuition. And he just…knows things, without any deductions, observations, or analysis. Nope. It’s true that in later canon, Sherlock honors women’s intuition more than he used to, and discusses moving forward on mere hunches. This is different, though—this is more like Smart Person Magic (™).

The false dichotomy of hard work vs. talent, as though the latter is somehow separate from the former and a lesser trait, is a problem myth that permeates my line of work in higher ed, of course, but also… /gestures widely/. I have a sinking feeling, nay, an educated guess, that the state of not only this country but much of the world right now, is largely because of this; the dearth of lifelong learners leads to crumbling chaos. I guess we’ll see what happens next. Whether we’ll learn anything from all this, is hard to say.

~

Learning really is fun, but I wonder how to convince anyone else that, who doesn’t already feel that way. Or if I even should try.

And then I have a conference with a student and I remember all over again. There are those who still seek. They’re still here, still opening books, still coming to conferences and reading my lectures with respect and interest. We haven’t yet gotten to the place in Fahrenheit 451 where the followers in the forest all have to memorize books in order to preserve them. The readers and the thinkers and the learners are still here. We need them more than ever, now. Let’s get together and share our shelves. Stack our brains into a new version of an ivory tower. Who’s with me? The game is afoot!

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You can read more of Jenn’s wonderful writing at her publication, Zuko’s Musings.

Beyond the Bookshelf is a reader-supported publication. If you are looking for ways to support Beyond the Bookshelf, please visit my support page and see the ways you can help continue the mission of exploring the connection between life and literature.

Until next time,